} Fire and the Cat

Franklin Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 32, 22 March 1939, Page 8 (Supplement)

} Fire and the Cat

| A REBUKE BY AN ADMIRAL j Admiral Sir William Goodenough si ems to have achived a striking picture of truly cloistered domesticity when he told a Manchester audience : that people who asked “What’s the good of it?” when they heard of a daring piece of Arctic exploration tempted him to reply, “Well, if you feel like that, sit by your fire and stroke the cat.” says the “Manchester Guardian.” Perhaps there are not many people of

that kind left in the world, and no doubt they deserve to be discouraged. A.: the same time, when the modern scheme of things inclines so readily to crash and crisis, there is a touch of something faintly soothing (albeit shamefaced) about the picture of an apostle of detachment sitting by the fireside and steadily stroking a purring cat. It may be inactive, it may be ignoble, but, so far as any world rt actions are concerned, it does sound thoroughly innocuous.

Pascal once laid it down that nearly all man’s misfortunes spring from his rot having known how to sit quietly in his room, which suggests that Pascal, at any rate, might have earned the Admiral’s condemnation for being ir sufficiently enthusiastic about Polar exploration. The pensive Frenchman did not, however, say anything about cats as an anchor for the restless — and it is the idea of endlessly stroking a complacent cat that adds the final touch of passivity .to Admiral Goodfnough's reproach. But if the cat is stroked too long is there not a risk that it may become supercharged with electricity and end up by shocking its cwner outside of his fireside repose? It is a hard world. Like the Polar ice, even cat cosseting has its perils.